[ExI] SIngularity - Non-Gender Specific

Damien Broderick thespike at satx.rr.com
Wed Sep 30 18:21:05 UTC 2009


On 9/30/2009 6:56 AM, Tom Nowell wrote:

< Dami[e]n wrote :"Since "the Singularity" is an abstract concept about 
rates of change in  technology, I don't see how it can be *personalized* 
as either male or  female, except in the figuration of Terminators or 
Gaiamind or some other comic-strip reductionism."

I have to disagree with Dami[e]n and Natasha here. Abstract concepts 
have a way of taking on their own lives once they leave the purely 
academic >

That's in part what I was trying to say.


< "The Singularity", as Anders pointed out, can refer to different 
things, as people have several different conceptions.

...So, asking a survey of people what they think of in association with 
the singularity - you might get as the top answers things like 
"nanotech", "uploading", "immortality", "artifical intelligence" and the 
like.

Now people have been arguing about whether the singularity naturally 
attracts men more than women because of any male disposition towards 
technology. I think a far more important factor is that some of the 
things associated with the singularity are more alienating to women than 
to men. >

Yes, this is an important point. But perhaps not so cut and dried as

<A singularity of mass uploading can be alienating to someone brought up 
in a culture of obsessing over body image and beauty - if "Fat is a 
feminist issue", then talk of abandoning the physical body as inevitable 
may be alienating. >

Those who reject "objectification" (as I believe they should) might also 
be persuaded to accept new forms that differ from a consumerist norm. 
And those for whom obsessive diets and "makeover" plastic surgery etc 
are not only acceptable but desirable, if only in their dreams, should 
also be open to such changes.

< Some of the visions of a near-singularity or post-singularity 
existence are radically depersonalised, dealing with posthumans and AI 
rather than people like us becoming transhuman. >

That's certainly one impulse in >H to date. But it's also interesting 
that Spock and Data are said to be sex objects among the slash 
community, mostly women.

Damien Broderick



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